Slow Motion

by Dani Shapiro

  “Let it out,” she whispers.

  Huge sobs rack my body, and I feel Lenny’s hand tentatively pat my back. I hate him, and I hate myself. Some small part of me knows that I will always be horrified by Lenny’s presence here. That he will be forever wrapped up in my memory of this day, like a blurry face in a grainy old group photo, under which a caption reads: Unidentified man, second from left.

  As Lenny, Diane, and I leave the hospital to get some lunch, my father’s sister, Shirl, and her husband, Moe, pull up in a taxi from the airport. Shirl’s face is etched with grief, the lines around her forehead and under her eyes more pronounced than I’ve ever seen them. Her eyes are filmy slits. Moe, who looks something like Leonard Bernstein in a yarmulke, is holding her by the elbow, and they both seem frail and old. The whole world has tilted off its axis overnight. Violence is in the air—violence and randomness. If my father had passed out not behind the wheel of his car during a snow storm but at lunch at the stock exchange, or while pulling on his socks in the morning, things would now be different. He might still be alive. And he would not have very nearly taken my mother with him.

  Shirl gives me a hug, and I introduce her to Lenny. It’s a little like bringing Queen Elizabeth around to visit a minimum-security prison. These are two people with nothing in common. Still, she grasps his hand with both of hers and gazes at him with deep sadness, as if his presence here must mean that he’s virtually a member of the family.

  Lenny, Diane, and I head into Summit for lunch. The town’s streets seem to be filled with families: young parents pushing toddlers in strollers, their breath vaporous clouds in the cold, shepherding gray-haired, pink-faced grandparents into the doors of restaurants. Christmas decorations are still on the lampposts and trees, and there are sale signs in all the store windows. As we wait for a table, a collective cheer goes up as a goal is scored in the hockey game being broadcast on the television at the end of the bar. My father is dead, and the Rangers are winning.

  I don’t know whether I can stomach any food, and though I tell myself I’m going to order a Diet Coke, I find myself asking for a screwdriver. The drink comes in a tall glass, and I can tell from the color of the orange juice that there’s a healthy shot of vodka in there. Could the waitress tell how much I needed it? Did she tell the bartender to make it a double?

  I gulp the screwdriver, then order another, this time asking for a double. No one suggests that this might not be a good idea; no one tells me to stop. Lenny holds my hand, stroking my fingers, fiddling with the diamond friendship ring he gave me last Valentine’s Day. I feel as if my eyes have been stripped. I horrify myself with my next thought: I wish he were dead.

  I excuse myself, saying I’m going to the ladies’ room, and instead stop at the bar and knock back a quick shot. When I am fortified enough, numbed against my own numbness, we head back to the hospital.

  Many years from now, when my father is a skeleton in the ground, when my mother strides the streets of New York City with her arms swinging, when Lenny Klein is reduced to a colorful if painful story in my mind, there will occasionally be a day when I feel the fear. The knot inside me will unravel, and suddenly my heart will pound uncontrollably, my palms will dampen, and my ears will begin to ring. Wherever I am, I will be desperate to escape. The urge will be to run as far as I can, as fast as I can, away from my own body. Like a tidal wave, it will come out of nowhere, this nameless, faceless terror.

  I will try every so-called panacea, every cure—meditation, homeopathy, behavioral therapy—but nothing will make it go away. Not really. Sometimes, I will be lulled into thinking it’s gone for good. But then years will pass, and suddenly it will be there again, haunting me like an old lover. It will return to remind me that I am my father’s daughter. That I inherited his terror, along with my mother’s will to survive.

  It is the winter of 1990, four years after my father’s death. I am at the Metropolitan Opera, clutching my mother’s elegant little opera glasses. My mother has lent me her subscription seat for the evening, and it is perfect: right center aisle, eight rows from the curtain. The lights dim, the curtains rustle, and the dramatic opening notes to Tosca fill the darkness.

  And then it begins. What sets it off? Perhaps it is the older couple in front of me, their gray heads bent together over the program. They remind me of my parents and how they are not growing old together. Or maybe it’s my own sense of myself in this moment, as a young woman at the opera who looks as if she doesn’t have a care in the world. On the outside, I am cool and impassive, but inside me, the resounding chords have become indistinguishable from the pounding of my heart, which is suddenly racing as if I’ve just done the hundred-meter dash. The curtain is rising, but I can barely see a thing. My vision has gone blurry, and my fingertips and toes are tingling. A thousand thoughts race through my mind, a collage of images. Is there a doctor in the house? Surely, in this opera-going crowd, there are at least a few cardiologists. In quick order, I imagine the production grinding to a halt, my body slumped in the plush velvet seat. I am still in my twenties, and I am picturing my own death.

  Quietly, I reach two fingers beneath the silk scarf encircling my throat, and take my own pulse. The image of my father—the father of my childhood—flashes before me. He is hunched over at the kitchen table holding his wrist, checking his pulse, his mouth tight. He taps a few pills into the palm of his hand and downs them in a single gulp. I follow the second hand on my watch for fifteen seconds, and realize my heart is pounding at nearly one hundred and forty beats a minute.

  I’m dying, I think to myself. Either that or I’m going crazy. I close my eyes against the swirl, waiting for the wave to crash over me, to sweep me out to sea. I have been expecting this; it does not surprise me. I am desperate for relief in any form—a handful of pills, a shot glass of scotch. This must have been what my father felt all his life, and he has passed it on to me in a sharp and terrifying legacy. There is a phrase running through my head, but the din is so loud it takes me a while to make it out.

  Of course. It is my father’s voice. Of course.

  The morning of my father’s funeral, I take a car service from the city to Overlook. The driver is the same guy who picked me up at the airport when I got back from California, but this time he doesn’t try to make conversation. Lenny is with me, and my friend Annette, whom I met in acting class. Annette hates Lenny. She’s a pretty girl from Texas with big round eyes and a flat drawl, and has a no-nonsense attitude about flashy married men who fuck around—but she’s also afraid of him. To make ends meet, she does secretarial temp work and has recently been employed by Lenny’s law firm. He doesn’t know this, and she has sworn me to secrecy. One drunken night in the near future, I will break my promise to Annette and tell Lenny that she temps for Belzer, Klein, Marchese & Rosenzweig, and he will march down to Personnel and see to it that she is fired. But today I am flanked by them in the backseat of the town car, holding a paper pint of Tropicana, trying to sip orange juice through a straw. I am afraid I’m about to black out.

  “We’ll get you a real drink as soon as we get there, Fox,” Lenny says.

  “She doesn’t need that—” Annette blurts out.

  “If you don’t mind, I think I just might know what she needs better than you do,” says Lenny, staring her down.

  Annette flushes.

  “But she really ought to keep her head clear—”

  “Will you both just stop it!” My voice is hoarse from the two packs of cigarettes I smoked the night before, and I can’t breathe in all the way. Yesterday’s lunchtime vodkas and the bottle of wine I drank for dinner have left my hands shaking. I focus on the back of the driver’s neck, pink above his white collar. There are two photographs Scotch-taped to the dashboard—I don’t remember noticing them before—class photos of a little boy and girl smiling gummily against a sky-blue backdrop. They look happy. I stare into the girl’s eyes and try to see her future: will she someday be riding in a limo next to her married lover
, on her way to her own father’s funeral?

  I lean my head against Lenny’s shoulder. He smells of aftershave and starch. He cannot help me. No one can. I feel myself begin to float away, and pull myself back with an invisible thread, a single, delicate strand of sanity. My entire life has been distilled into a single pinpoint of purpose. My father is dead, and I stopped caring about myself long ago, but today I have a mission: if I let go of the thread, I know that my mother won’t have a prayer in hell of surviving.

  She is propped up in bed, wearing a dark burgundy silk robe over her hospital pajamas. I will later learn that my friend Diane brought her the robe from the city, that it belonged to Diane’s boyfriend’s grandfather. These are the kinds of details that remain fixed in my memory—their very oddity is what makes them indelible. For my father’s funeral, my mother is wearing the clothing of a stranger.

  “My beautiful daughter, all dressed in black,” she murmurs, reaching her arms out to me as I walk through the door to her room, Lenny and Annette trailing behind me. My mother’s propensity to see things in pictures—a trait I have inherited—has not left her, even in this moment. There are people, all sorts of people, milling about. Doctors, relatives, friends. Someone has run a comb through her hair, and she is wearing lipstick.

  “It’s time—” someone whispers.

  A stretcher is wheeled next to my mother’s bed. It takes three orderlies to lift her, and as they do I see the tension in their faces, as if she were a piece of delicate china only just glued back together. As if she can shatter into a thousand pieces on the floor. A nurse carefully maneuvers the intravenous pole and traction equipment around as they place her on the stretcher.

  Once she is settled, I realize I have been holding my breath. I try to swallow, but my throat is dry. I take her left hand and gently place her wedding band, which I have been wearing for safekeeping, back on her ring finger.

  “Oh God, I can’t—” she gasps. It is the only time I’ve ever heard my mother say I can’t.

  “I’m right here,” I say, and in that moment, something shifts. A box in my mind opens, and I know that everything I might otherwise feel, think, or say on this day will be placed in that box, deferred for viewing at a later date.

  “Hold my hand, Dani,” my mother says. “Hold my hand and don’t let go.”

  Hundreds of mourners fill the auditorium of Overlook Hospital. They are standing in clusters, groups of old friends who haven’t seen each other in years, business associates of my father’s, relatives who hopped planes within hours of hearing the news. The first thing I see, beyond the dark crowd, is a plain pine box in the front of the room. My cousin Mordechai, one of Shirl’s sons who is a rabbi, is swaying over the box, holding a prayer book. I see the box and then register that my father is inside it. I’ve never seen a coffin before, and the realization hits me with all the force of a physical blow. I want to tear the lid off the box, gripped by the insane notion that my father won’t be able to breathe in there. I am holding my mother’s hand, stealing glances at her. She hasn’t seen her husband’s casket yet. Who picked it out? It seems awfully plain, as if it will disintegrate quickly—which I guess is the whole point.

  Lenny is at my side, and I don’t want him there. Suddenly, I can’t bear the idea that Lenny is at my father’s funeral, but there’s nothing I can do about that now. I keep my body between Lenny and my mother’s stretcher. I don’t want him near her.

  “Listen,” I whisper in his ear, “I have to stay with my mother. Why don’t you go sit over there—” I point to an empty seat next to a few friends he knows slightly.

  He looks at me accusingly.

  “Lenny, just do it,” I say.

  I watch as Lenny squeezes past an older couple and takes a seat next to some of my college friends. He looks lost in their midst, like a grown-up who has accidentally wandered over to the kids’ table. He’s still glaring at me, and I turn my head away. Lenny has always told me he would be here for me if the shit ever hit the fan. As long as I’m alive, you’ll never have to worry about anything, he has often said, his voice hoarse with emotion. As I walk alongside my mother’s stretcher as we wheel her down the center aisle of the auditorium, it occurs to me that Lenny is here, all right—and he’s making things worse.

  The orderlies park the stretcher right next to the front row, near the rest of the immediate family. Susie waves me over, but I cannot leave my mother’s side. Everyone is staring at her. It’s hard not to. Her bed is like a float in a parade, her casts and sheets ghostly white amid the black suits and dresses of mourning.

  Oh, Irene, I’m so sorry—

  My God, look at you—

  If there’s anything—

  People descend like vultures. They converge on my mother’s bed, leaning over her, their eyes wet with sorrow. The doctor’s words—She may not survive this—swim through my head, and I gently, or perhaps not so gently, push my mother’s friends away. I see dread on her face. She has seen my father’s casket, which is now right in front of us, and a moan escapes her lips. She squeezes my hand, the edge of her ring digging into my palm.

  The rabbi enters the auditorium, and suddenly everything begins moving too quickly. Time speeds up, and I cannot hold on to it, I can’t catch it and slow it down. He begins to speak—this rabbi who married my parents twenty-seven years ago—or perhaps he begins to sing. He has a deep, ringing voice, and he rolls his r’s. He seems closer to God than the rest of us. My mouth feels like a cavern, empty all the way to the back of my throat. For a moment, I think that I have been rendered mute, that I may never speak again.

  I cannot peel my eyes away from the plain pine casket. It’s wider on top, and narrower on the bottom. In fact, the whole thing seems too narrow. How do I know it’s my father in that box? What if they made a mistake and switched caskets? As a child, I used to wonder if perhaps my parents got me mixed up at the hospital and brought home the wrong baby. Could it be we’re burying the wrong man, and that my father is still alive and ranting up on the sixth floor?

  Now my uncle Morton is walking to the podium, holding a few sheets of paper. He looks small and old, with a dark yarmulke perched on his head. Why Morton? He’s only a brother-in-law. Why isn’t Harvey up there? I steal a glance at my father’s brother. He’s staring straight ahead, tears rolling down his cheeks, his jaw bunched.

  “Is anyone else giving a eulogy?” I lean over and whisper in my mother’s ear. This is a detail that, until now, has eluded me. It is possible that I’ve never used the word eulogy in a sentence before in my life.

  “John Hirsch,” she whispers back. Hirsch is my father’s partner, or actually his boss. He’s a good fifteen years younger than my father. A portly, rich guy. Come to think of it, sort of a Lenny type.

  I don’t pause to wonder how my mother arrived at these choices. She didn’t ask me to speak—though God knows, I wouldn’t have wanted to. I doubt she asked Susie, or Harvey. I try to focus on what my uncle Morton is saying, but it might as well be in another language. After Morton is finished, John Hirsch gets up and says a few words, words I will not remember. His gold watch, his cracking voice, the feather on the hat of a woman in the third row, and the sound of the rabbi’s mellifluous Hebrew as he recites the Twenty-third Psalm—these are what stick to my bones.

  In a flash the service is over. The doctors may have asked the rabbi to keep it short for my mother’s sake. I noticed several of them standing in the back of the auditorium. Are they there to pay their respects to a man they never knew or to make sure that if anything happens to my mother she receives immediate help?

  The rabbi announces that the burial will take place at Washington Cemetery in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. My Orthodox cousins all seem to know what to do, as if, in the yeshiva, there were classes in the etiquette of death. The men surround my father’s casket, hoisting it onto their shoulders, carrying it through the lobby of Overlook Hospital and into the bright February morning. A hearse is waiting by the curb.

&n
bsp; In the moments before we leave for the cemetery, I have no idea where I should be, or what I should be doing. My mother is inside the hospital, her family and friends huddled around her stretcher. From what I can gather, they’re discussing who should stay with her and who should go to the cemetery. I have walked in and out the sliding glass doors of the hospital a half-dozen times already, watching as my father’s casket is loaded into the hearse, running back into the lobby to let my mother know what’s going on.

  “What about Dani? What’s Dani doing?” someone asks, as if I’m not standing right there. A white-hot rage crashes over me, and I turn to see who the asshole is who could possibly imagine that there’s a choice in the matter, that I might not go to my father’s burial. But something stops me, something stronger than rage; I realize it’s guilt that I’m feeling, horrible guilt that I have to choose between my two parents at this moment.

  “I’ll call you,” I whisper to my mother. “From the cemetery. The minute I get there.”

  She clasps me to her, strokes my hair.

  “Oh, Dani, I’m so sorry you have to go through this alone,” she says.

  Lenny materializes by my side. I had almost forgotten about him in the last half hour. By now my parents have met Lenny. My father has died thinking that this is the life I have chosen.